Can You Read a Migration Chart?

What is a Migration Chart? What is migration? What does it have to do with us in our community? Four of us finally had a lesson with these mysterious-looking charts last Thursday. It didn’t take very long, but it got us thinking. . .

We saw our initials on the menu in the morning and made a mental note to look around at eleven o’clock for our lesson.

Some people were just finishing a lesson about leaf venation, some were discussing who would do what on their nearly-finished timeline and a few were painting. We saw that our teacher was sitting at a table with a pile of charts.

“Oh, the Bowling Ball chart,” we thought. That’s what this is about. Our teacher began telling us some stories about the “migrations,” or movements, of human beings on the planet.Sometimes, she explained, a group moves into an area inhabited by another group which moves into another area inhabited by still another group and so on, so that several groups are affected by one group’s migration.

Now, here was one that really got us going. It shows how people sometimes cut forest and burn an area, getting wonderful soil for growing crops. After a few years, they decide to move to another area to cut forest and burn that area to get more good garden space. Pretty soon there is a lot of space recovering and trying to re-grow forest.

Here is another way human migrations happen: One group creates a barrier, or a wall, so that no one can move. Then, someone breaks through and a large number move through, breaking over or through the wall.

Then we heard that sometimes groups move into another group and simply set up their own groups within it. There are little areas in New York City, for example, called “Little Italy” or “Chinatown,” where, at least for a while, groups migrating to the city maintained their own communities within it.

Now, here is a chart that illustrates more what our community looks like! All kinds of groups move in, work together, or don’t, and eventually, retaining some of their original characteristics, likes and dislikes, talents and styles, they form a kind of a swirl of humans representing many different origins.

We have been challenged to choose a chart and to find out about some examples in history and write about them. Each of us found one that captured our imagination and claimed it for further investigation. Some charts suggest stories we’ve seen on the Second Timeline of Humans; some resemble more recent history—and even current events. Migration, we realize, has quite a bit to do with how it is that we are here now.